A Different Kind of Caption Contest

Ever wonder what the longest cartoon caption in New Yorker history is? The answer can be found over at the New Yorker Store blog. Read about how cartoonists George Booth and Henry Martin engaged in a friendly escalation of caption lengths. For more on Booth, there’s David Owen’s Profile of the cartoonist from the 1998 Cartoon Issue. Readers may be surprised to learn that it took Booth twenty years of submissions before selling his first cartoon to he magazine:

In his early submissions to The New Yorker, Booth … allowed his drawing style to be influenced by the painterly compositions of Charles Addams and Peter Arno.

It didn’t work. “Finally,” Booth says, “I realized the stuff I was submitting wasn’t even funny to me—it didn’t make me laugh. I was trying to be somebody I wasn’t. But then I would write a letter to someone at home in Missouri, and I would draw some dumb thing on the envelope and that would make me cackle…and I finally understood that I wasn’t going to make anyone laugh if I couldn’t make myself laugh first.” He began drawing to please himself, and not long afterward The New Yorker began to say yes.

_The entire article—and the complete archives of The New Yorker, back to 1925—is available to subscribers. Non-subscribers can purchase the individual issue.